PaperTab: In a few years, your computer might resemble a stack of paper

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A group of Canadian researchers, working with Intel and Plastic Logic, is showing off a brand new computing paradigm at CES 2013 in Las Vegas, constructed out of a new gadget called the PaperTab.

Each PaperTab is a flexible, 10.7-inch e-ink touchscreen display, powered by a Core i5 processor. Instead of using it like a normal tablet, though, the idea is that you have lots of PaperTabs — 10 or more, spread out on a table in front of you — with each tablet representing a single app. One tab might be your browser, another might be your email, another might be a calculator, and so on.

The most interesting aspect of this new paradigm, though, is that each PaperTab is aware of other PaperTabs in its proximity. You might push two PaperTabs together to extend an app onto two screens, or you could attach a file to an email by simply tapping one PaperTab on another.

Now, unfortunately for us — this being ExtremeTech and all — there’s almost no information about how Queen’s University, Plastic Logic, and Intel are actually performing this demo. We know something about the displays — they’re flexible, e-ink displays made by Plastic Logic — but very little beyond that. Judging by the huge amount of tethering, it’s almost guaranteed that there’s a big desktop computer underneath the desk, doing all of the work — and the tethers are probably providing power to the displays, too (flexible batteries are coming along nicely, but still have some way to go).

The proximity detection technology is quite neat, but we’re probably just talking about a fairly basic use of NFC — and NFC/RFID is one tech that is flexible.

All in all, we’re really just talking about a tech demo — a cool tech demo with an appealing video, but a tethered pipe dream demo nonetheless. It will be a few years yet until we have processors and batteries that are thin enough and flexible enough to create a real PaperTab.

But perhaps I’m being unfairly critical. Another possibility would be an intermediate step — a flexible display, tethered to a smartphone in your pocket. It probably wouldn’t be worth the effort though: You might as well just use your smartphone, or, in a few years, a head-up display of some kind.